Back in the Windows XP days, you could easily add Control Panel to My Computer with a simple checkbox in the folder view settings. Windows 7 and Vista don’t make this quite as easy, but there’s still a way to get it back.

To make this tweak, we’ll be doing a quick registry hack, but there’s a downloadable version provided as well.

Manual Registry Tweak to Add Control Panel

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace

Now that you’re there, you’ll need to right-click and create a new key…

If you want to add the regular Control Panel view, with the categories, you’ll need to use one GUID as the name of the key. If you want the icon view instead, you can use the other key. Here they are:

• Category View:  {26EE0668-A00A-44D7-9371-BEB064C98683}
• Icon View: {21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

Once you’re done, it should look like this:

Now over in the Computer view, just hit the F5 key to refresh the panel, and you should see the new icon pop up in the list:

Now when you click on the icon you’ll be taken to Control Panel. If you didn’t know how to change the view before, you can use the drop-down box on the right-hand side to switch between Category and icon view.

Downloadable Registry Hack

Rather than deal with manual registry editing, you can simply download the file, extract it, and then either double-click on the AddCategoryControlPanel.reg to add the Category view icon, or AddIconControlPanel.reg to add the other icon. There’s an uninstall script provided for each.

Download ControlPanelMyComputer Registry Hack from howtogeek.com